Nokia used to be the king of smartphones and feature phones, now it rules neither. While Windows Phone as a platform is on the rise, the growth is very slow, and in its last quarter, its Asha line of feature phones took a massive tumble in terms of shipments. Well, the writing was up against the wall considering Android smartphones have been becoming cheaper and smoother to use, month after month, but Q1 of 2013, was a real knock-out punch for Nokia. The Finnish company hopes that the Lumia 520, which was announced at MWC earlier this year, could be the smartphone that could take on Android smartphones in the sub-Rs 10,000 segment. Priced at Rs 10,499, it does pack in all the things that Nokia stands for and offers a decent feature spread. But does it tick all the right boxes for the average Indian consumer? Read on to find out.

Design and Build

Nokia has done a superb job with its Lumia line of smartphones. All, the devices look beautiful and are available in attractive colors that in an ideal world would grab attention like a fancy Ferrari on the street. The reality, though is quite different. Due to the lack of apps, Nokia has gone through a tough time selling its phones. That said, there are still certain things only Nokia can pull off at a scale. One of these things of course is designing and building a very high quality product at a very affordable price.

Companies like Samsung may own the market, but they still don’t have the build quality especially when we are talking about low-end smartphones. With the Lumia 520 though, Nokia has basically taken its signature design language and built a phone that looks and feels similar to some of its more high-end products but at only Rs 10,499.

The Lumia 520 is made of the same mono-body polycarbonate shell that we saw in the Lumia 620. This time around, instead of opting for curves, Nokia has gone for a more straightforward rectangular fascia that reminds us a lot of the HTC 8X. Even from the back, the polycarbonate shell gently tapers off, making the device ergonomic to hold for extended periods. Unlike, the HTC 8X, the Lumia 520 does not have an uni-body design, but has a removable back plate just like the Lumia 620. This also means that users can remove the battery and install another one if need be.

Another great thing about the Lumia 520 is that it is also one of the thinnest Lumia smartphones in the market at 9.9 mm. It’s also quite the featherweight at 124 grams. It will not beat the iPhone 5, but it will handily beat most others.

Coming back to the design, on the front Nokia has increased the size of the screen to 4-inches from the 3.8-inches on the Lumia 620. This means the 520 is slightly taller than the 620, but that’s not a deal breaker. In fact, Nokia touts that as an added benefit, as users prefer larger screens these days. That said, the resolution of the screen stays the same at 800×480 pixels, so this means the 520 loses out to the 620 in terms of pixel density. Still, for a phone in this price range this is very good, though the viewing angles are not the best. The touch response also feels a little coarse when compared to the Lumia 620. But it feels miles ahead of the Lumia 510, which is still stuck on Windows Phone 7.8 or for that matter a cheap Android smartphone made by a local vendor.

Below the display, we have the standard issue Window Phone capacitive control keys. Above the display we get the standard array of sensors, but there is no front facing camera, so if you need to video chat, then you may need to revisit your decision to buy the Lumia 520. On the top we get a 3.5mm port and the right spine is home to the volume rockers, the power key and the camera shutter key. The bottom end houses the microUSB slot.

Like all the other Lumia smartphones we again get the nice ceramic keys that are comfortable to use, feel long lasting and blend well with the Lumia design language.

The back of the device is home to the 5-megapixel camera and a speaker grill. There is no LED flash. When one pops open the back plate, one can see a 1,430-mAh battery which is bigger than the one seen in the Lumia 620. There is also a standard SIM slot and a microSD card slot that supports up to 64GB of memory.

Overall, we felt that Nokia has done an amazing job with Lumia 520. That said, there are definite trade-offs in terms of features and the build of the 520 as it feels a step below the Lumia 620 as our review unit had the propensity to creak quite regularly.

Hardware

Like the Lumia 620 and the Lumia 720, the Lumia 520 is powered by a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon Play processor that is clocked at 1GHz. There is also 512MB of RAM and 8GB of internal memory that can be further expanded via the microSD card slot. Nokia uses an 4-inch LCD which has a resolution of 800×480 pixels, but unlike the Lumia 620 it does not have the ClearBlack branding on it. This means it loses on a polarizing filter that bumps up the black levels.

In our testing we found the display on the Lumia 520 to be good enough for a phone costing Rs 10,499. Obviously, the display feels washed out when compared to more expensive phones, but we deem it to be okay when compared with other smartphones at the same price.

We also believe that the bigger display on the 520 will be more popular than the 3.8-inch panel on the Lumia 620. The only quibble we had was in terms of legibility under direct sunlight, which was not ideal. Nokia also employs its super sensitive touch technology that we have seen before on the Lumia 920. This means we can use the phone with gloves. We tested this feature, and it works mostly works fine.

Software

A lot has been written about the Windows Phone user interface in previous reviews, and we believe it’s not worth pondering on. The basic tile based ethos is simple to use and understand and offers a fine balance between the hyper customizable Android and the jail like spartan iPhone UI. As is the case, Microsoft enforces some hardware restrictions which means, most Windows Phones operate smoothly.

Nokia adds its own touch on all of its Lumia devices with exclusive apps and frankly these apps are the only reason the Windows Phones platform is worthwhile. Apps like Nokia MixRadio, Nokia Music, City Lens and Here Maps are staples of the Espoo based company and all these prove to be must haves for a Windows Phone user. In fact, we’d posit that Nokia’s Here maps are arguable better than Google Maps that most use on Android or the iPhone. Especially for India and they provide a more comprehensive offline mapping experience something Google is yet to emulate.

There are also a ton of apps that will attract photographers like Cinematograph and Smart Shoot. Smart Shoot enables users to take the best possible picture by removing unwanted elements from the image and also allowing for some Instagram like filters. Cinematograph on the other hand allows users to create cool animated images.

Nokia has other goodies in the works that it recently announced, and these apps will also come the Lumia 520 for free. Suffice to say, if one is going the Windows Phone way then you are getting the best of the best with a Lumia smartphone even if it is the cheapest Windows Phone in the market.

Performance

Performance on any Windows Phone 8 device almost always seems to be rather flawless. That remains true for even the Lumia 520, and this should be expected because it uses the same 1GHz dual-core processor as the Lumia 620 along with 512 MB of RAM. The main stumbling block is that some apps these days need a minimum 1GB of RAM and these apps will not work on the Lumia 520. This further intensifies the paucity of apps on the Lumia 520.

Nokia has taken the same camera module as the Lumia 620 and performance largely remains the same. Which means it is good in normal bright lighting, in fact surprisingly good in such conditions, but very bad in low-light. This situation becomes worse in the Lumia 520 because it lacks a LED flash.

Call quality on the Lumia 520 is solid like other Nokia smartphones. The quality is surely a step above the competition. Our standard test involves using the device in the basement at a point where call drops are quite constant. We tested the Lumia 520, and it managed to run through a call without a hitch. In comparison the high-end LG Optimus G failed a call on the same spot using the same SIM. Even generally, calls sounded crisper while we used the Lumia 520 than say the LG Optimus G or the Sony Xperia SP.

In terms of battery life, the Lumia 520 was not as impressive as the Lumia 620, but it still delivered solid performance. This was slightly surprising as the Lumia 520 has a bigger battery than the Lumia 620. In our testing we used the phone a lot with 3G turned on. We often switched between Facebook and Twitter, around 2 hours of calls on a daily basis, about an hour of web browsing, some photography and a bit of music streaming via MixRadio. We managed to run through the day without any problems. Over the course of our testing we can safely say the Lumia 520 lasted for around 25-28 hours on a daily basis for over two weeks.

Verdict

The Lumia 520 delivers a compelling experience at Rs 10,499, something which no other Android smartphone can replicate. We are starting to see devices like the Zen UltraFone 701HD, which delivers something close to Windows Phone like UI fluidity on Android at Rs 12,000, but even that device does not match the fit, finish and after sales of a Nokia smartphone.

The main deterrent for Windows Phone remains the app ecosystem. Nokia is doing its bit to improve it but its too little and if that’s something of a necessity then there are options in Android, but by local vendors.

Photographs: Rohit Sharma

Jabra has made a name for itself by delivering high quality Bluetooth peripherals for smartphones and tablets for years. Its Bluetooth headsets have set the bar in the market as they deliver sublime audio quality, comfort of use and they are built like tanks. Unlike the Bluetooth headsets, the Tour is a speakerphone, which Jabra believes can be handy in both the car while driving and be a companion in the conference room. Additionally, it claims that it can also double as a speaker for listening to music. We put it through the paces, read on to find out if it’s any good.

DESIGN AND BUILD

Like any Jabra product, the Tour is built like a tank. Jabra uses a metallic frame for the Tour, on which there is a circular speaker covered by a speaker grill.

Design-wise it is quite futuristic and, the Tour definitely looks quite unique. We’d rather say that it reminds us of Captain Kirk’s communicator a bit, though it is a wee bit larger than Kirk’s trusty comm, it is not meant to be a portable device. It supposed to be stationary.

On top of the circular grill, we have a large call button that is used to receive or cancel calls. The speaker assembly is flanked by twin volume keys on the bottom.  Jabra has also incorporated a motion sensor, which also sits just above the speaker.

On the right hand side, there is a microUSB charging port and a mute button. On the left, there is the power ON/OFF toggle.

Below the main speakerphone assembly, Jabra has conjured a kickstand, which can be clipped on to a desk or on the cars sunscreen visor.

SETUP

Jabra claims that the Tour can connect up to two devices via Bluetooth. In our testing the device worked as advertised and the setup process was quite hassle free, all that one needed to do was pair up the speaker with one’s device and we were good to go. We did not face any issue while trying to pair it with a wide variety of devices. Our testing included, our Windows 8 desktop, a MacBook Pro, a Nokia Lumia smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the iPhone 5 and the iPad 2.

PERFORMANCE

As far the call quality went, the Jabra Tour was really fantastic. It was a handy tool. That said, when it was connected to multiple devices, it showed the propensity to get confused between the two and at times when we wanted to revert to the phone while taking a call, it would refuse to switch off the loudspeaker. But when only a single device was connected it performed like a charm.

It has voice controls as well, and one can receive calls and dial in contacts using this feature. It works pretty well, but funny enough it also allows the user to cut the call using this feature. We had a few weird moments, while trying to cut the call using this feature. Imagine having a conversation with your mother and then telling the speaker to cancel the call, which is by the way audible to the listener.

The good bit about the voice control is that it works for setting up the device, and it even works for caller ID. For Indians though, this feature is a bit redundant, considering the device makes a mockery of Indian names. But that’s true for most voice enabled features; even Google Maps faces the same problem.

Using the Tour as a speaker to play music was an underwhelming experience. Jabra makes a big deal of a 40mm 3-watt speaker in the Tour, but the performance isn’t anything worth writing home about. The sound is garbled, muddy and distorted. It cannot be used for anything that has bass in it because, well, one cannot expect anything this small to reproduce any low-end, and when a song has some guitar parts, the speakers cannot resolve the complexity of the sound. Add to that compressed audio via Bluetooth, we get something that sounds close to music, but still is not music.

In terms of battery life, the Jabra Tour was really impressive. It lasted around 26-28 hours consistently on a single charge which is surprisingly close to the advertised time. This means that it delivered around 16 hours of talk time and some standby time which is impressive indeed.

VERDICT

At Rs 6,500 the Jabra Tour is an impressive yet slightly expensive loudspeaker. Jabra will say it has other features that make it worth the price, but at the end of the day one should realize it is a brilliantly engineered speakerphone that lasts more than most and delivers wonderful call quality.

A 7-inch phone might be considered as an excess by many, but if the number of phablets being launched recently is anything to go by, there is a budding market in the country companies are scampering to tap into. With the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2, Micromax Funbook P600 and HCL ME Y3 already present, Asus has put its hat in the ring with its 7-incher FonePad. How good is the phablet you ask? Well, let’s find out.

DESIGN

Unlike many tablets in the market today, the Asus FonePad sports a seemingly metallic body with a matte finish that gives it a premium look and feel. You will find the volume rocker and power button on the left side and the earphone jack and a microUSB port at the bottom. The back panel is split into two parts— the bigger part holds an non-removable 4,270mAH battery and a speaker grille near the bottom, while the top is removable and hosts a SIM card and a microSD card slot. The top part feels quite secure and needs some effort to pry open which is a good thing, considering we wouldn’t want it falling out every other day.

On the front, the FonePad sports a 7-inch display with quite a big bezel. The screen though is a fingerprint magnet and we had to wipe it clean every time we switched off the display. It isn’t protected by a Gorilla Glass either and hence is quite prone to scratches.

In terms of ergonomics, the tablet is easy enough to hold in one hand thanks to its tapered edges. Even though I have what you might call small hands, I could easily hold the device in one hand while on a call and though it was a little awkward in the beginning, after a point of time you forget it is huge.

HARDWARE

The FonePad sports a 7-inch IPS (1280×800 pixels) display with a 216ppi density which is the same as in the Nexus 7. The display does a good job in producing vibrant and punchy colors and features good viewing angles too. Asus also allows users to adjust the display’s temperature and saturation which is a nice little touch. That said, the screen unfortunately is quite reflective, and indoors or outdoors reading becomes a little difficult. We also noticed the text on white background was not as smooth and it looked pixilated and jagged at times.

The FonePad is the first tablet in the world to feature Intel’s Lexington Z2420 chipset and is powered by a 1.2GHz Intel Atom processor, PowerVR GC540 GPU and 1GB of RAM. In terms of storage it comes with 8GB of internal storage which can be expanded up to 32GB using a microSD card.

Talking of the tablet’s photo-clicking abilities, it features a 3.1-megapixel rear camera with auto-focus and a 1.2-megapixel camera at the front, both of which are capable of shooting videos at 720p. The rear camera performed decently outdoors but was below average indoors under ambient lighting. There was quite a bit of noise in the pictures and not many details either. The secondary camera too is average at best and is only good enough for video chatting.

On the connectivity front, the FonePad supports 3G and includes the standard options like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and microUSB port.

SOFTWARE

The FonePad comes bundled with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean out of the box with a UI that is not too heavy on the OS and hence performance is quite smooth without any visible stutters. The homescreen offers up to 7 panels which can be customized with widgets and app shortcuts. On the drop down notification menu, apart from the usual settings and shortcut buttons, Asus has offered quite a few extra shortcut buttons.

The tablet features onscreen UI buttons and aside from the usual Back, Home and Task buttons that you see on Android devices, Asus has added a fourth button which functions as a sort of widget drawer. This allows you to access widgets like calculator, calendar and stop watch and among others from anywhere. Another neat little feature is the Audio Wizard that lets users choose what kind of default sound settings they want activated when using the tablet from among music, gaming and videos options.

There are also a few pre-loaded apps included on the tablet like App Backup, Dictionary, MyLibrary, Asus Story, Asus Studio and a Web Storage app that provides up to 5GB free cloud storage.

PERFORMANCE

Up till this point, FonePad has been a very decent piece of hardware. But it is in its performance that the tablet struggles. Though performance is smooth most of the times, it tends to lose its composure inside certain heavier apps. For example, in apps like Chrome or Facebook the scrolling is not as smooth as you would want it to be and there is discernable lag. To keep up a lag-free performance, users will need to keep killing apps at regular intervals.

Audio quality too is a mixed bag at best. Notifications are generally audible even from inside the pockets, but when watching videos or listening to music, the speakers aren’t loud feel enough. In-call audio quality also suffers in this regard and even indoors with the TV on and the fan at full-speed, it is a little difficult to hear the person at the other end. This is something we feel won’t be an issue when a person uses a decent pair of handsfree headset, but sadly Asus doesn’t provide one in the box.

Battery life shouldn’t give users much to complain about, thanks to the relatively low powered processor and the massive 4,270mAH battery. The battery just about lasted a day when using the tablet with a SIM card inside. We used the tablet to make voice calls, and continuously used apps like Chrome, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

VERDICT

To sum up then, the Asus FonePad is a good device with a nice display and decent audio quality. It may not have the premium feel of the iPad mini, but the FonePad is not too far behind and the tablet’s ability to make phone calls will prove to be a tipping point for many. It has its share of positives and at an aggressive price of Rs 15,999 it won’t burn a hole in the pockets either.

Photographs: Eshan Shetty

How do you trump the world’s best-selling smartphone? That’s the billion dollar question every time Apple launches a new iPhone. But this time it is Samsung and its flagship Galaxy S 4 smartphone that’s doing the bidding. The Galaxy S III has been a runaway success for Samsung and has come to define Android as a platform more than Google’s own Nexus series of devices. It might not have been the best smartphone but it remains to be the best-selling Android smartphone of all time. Does the Galaxy S 4 have enough in it to take over from its predecessor? Let’s find out.

DESIGN

Samsung isn’t renowned for the industrial design of its smartphones and it shows in the Galaxy S 4. Comparing it side by side to last year’s Galaxy S III becomes a game of ‘spot the difference’ with most people failing to distinguish between the two if the display is turned off. Despite rumors prior to the launch pointing out possibilities of the Korean electronics giant going for a metallic chassis, things haven’t changed much. Having said that, it is an incredible feat to fit in a larger 5-inch display in a footprint that is actually a little smaller than the Galaxy S III, which sports a 4.8-inch display.

Samsung continues to use plastic for the back panel, though it does seem to be of a slightly better quality than that on the Galaxy S III. The black has a dotted pattern that makes it look a little different from its predecessor but it is also a fingerprint magnet. If, like me, you have an OCD of keeping the surface of the phone clean, be prepared to keep a cleaning cloth handy. The faux metal trimmings remain on the mid-frame. The placement of various ports and buttons are similar to the Galaxy S III as well, which is a good thing, especially having the power button on the side rather than on the top.

The Galaxy S 4 is no premium feeling or looking smartphone and the industrial design doesn’t come close to that of the HTC One. Looking from Samsung’s perspective, the use of plastic has not impacted sales of the Galaxy S III and there is no reason why that should be the case here. Playing the devil’s advocate here, I might add that for many users plastic would actually fare better than metal as it not only makes the device lighter but also durable with less chances of it getting dented or scratched.

HARDWARE

What the Galaxy S 4 lacks in design, it makes up in hardware and that is also one of the key reasons for Samsung’s success. The device has the best silicon available and also packs in a number of new sensors, which I believe will set the tone for the industry and also pave way for new use cases and apps.

The Galaxy S 4 available in India features Samsung’s latest Exynos 5 Octa processor, which has two pairs of quad-core processors though only one of them works at any point of time. Based on ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture, where the 1.2GHz Cortex A7 quad-core processor does most of the mundane tasks and the 1.6GHz Cortex A15 quad-core processor kicks in for heavy lifting. This is supposed to conserve battery but it is difficult to gauge if that’s the case in the absence of the Galaxy S 4′s Snapdragon 600 variant. The processor is coupled with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal memory, which has become a staple for most flagship Android smartphones. Unlike the HTC One, the Galaxy S 4 comes with a microSD card slot and a removable battery, things that appeal to power users.

The 5-inch 1080p display is a treat for the eyes. Even though the HTC One with its 4.8-inch 1080p display has a slightly higher pixel density, it hardly makes any noticeable difference. The viewing angles are stellar and it is bright enough to be readable in most settings. If you, like me, hated the color reproduction on Samsung’s Super AMOLED displays, there’s some good news. Samsung has added new display settings that provides RGB color reproduction that photographers use and even an adaptive setting that would change according to the visual on the display. However, auto-brightness remains as iffy as ever and Samsung needs to tune its ambient light sensor. I ended up turning off auto-brightness and toggled brightness manually.

The Galaxy S 4 has a 13-megapixel camera, which in my books is the best camera on any Android smartphone and is at par, if not better, than the iPhone 5′s 8-megapixel camera under most settings. Despite HTC’s claims about the “Ultrapixel” camera on the One, I found the Galaxy S 4′s camera to be most versatile under majority of conditions. Yes, it might not have the same low light performance as that of the One, yet it performed better under all other conditions.

It borrows the camera UI from Samsung’s Galaxy Camera, which makes the camera easy to use. Like most smartphones of 2013, it comes with multiple shooting modes and includes editing features for group shots, removing unwanted elements from a photo and animated shots. Then there is a feature that lets users click a photo using both front and rear cameras simultaneously. I’m not a big fan of that feature and found it to be gimmicky. Ditto for clicking a photo and recording a nine second audio clip with it.

Samsung is also introducing an array of new sensors in the Galaxy S 4 apart from the regular accelerometer, gyroscope and ambient light sensors. The new additions include a gesture sensor, a temperature and humidity sensor as well as a barometer for good measure. The gesture sensor, which is essentially a pair of IR sensors on either side of the earpiece, is a crucial part of the new TouchWiz UI elements while the temperature and humidity sensor is used in its S-Health application. Hopefully, developers would soon start incorporating these sensors in their apps for added functionality.

SOFTWARE

Samsung calls the Galaxy S 4 a “life companion” and its software additions on top of Android are a big part of that vision. The world’s largest smartphone vendor has been tinkering with TouchWiz for a couple of years now and in my opinion, this is the closest it can come without forking Android. The latest iteration of TouchWiz has so many software additions that users would keep finding new things even after months of using the device. While it is next to impossible to detail all of them, let’s check out some key features.

While the Galaxy S 4 does not get a stylus like the Galaxy Note II, it does get Air View and users can get previews of mails, calendar entries, photo albums, videos among others without touching the display. It works mostly but still has limited third-party app support. Gesture View takes it a step forward by allowing users to accept calls, move through photos in an album or just wake the screen to see notifications without touching the display. For this, users have to move their hands over the pair of sensors near the earpiece. While these are interesting add-ons, they have a sporadic success rate, especially the gesture to accept calls. The idea that users might want to use their phones when their hands are wet or dirty is pure genius, the execution is not perfect.

Same goes for Smart stay and Smart scroll features. Smart stay is an old feature that is supposed to track the user’s eye and keep the display on or off depending whether the user is looking at the display or not. Now videos are also supposed to pause if the user looks away, but this feature never worked for me. Smart scroll, as the name suggests, scrolls web pages by tracking the user’s eye. Sadly, this feature works only on the default web browser and does not work even on Chrome. While I was able to scroll pages by just looking at the web page, controlling the scroll is a hit or miss affair. Also, both Smart stay and Smart scroll require perfect lighting conditions.

S-Health is an interesting app that combines the functions of a Nike Fuelband like device and even shows the ambient temperature and humidity. The phone also comes with a remote control app for televisions and set-top boxes, though support for Indian DTH set-top boxes is not so great. We were, however, able to control our Tata Sky set-top box effortlessly, after trying various options available in the list.

All these features have bloated TouchWiz to such an extent that users get only 8.82GB of internal memory when they buy the 16GB version. In comparison, the Galaxy S III had 11.25GB. Samsung says that the presence of a microSD card slot should take care of situations if the user runs out of internal storage. The UI skin is so heavy that it shows even during regular usage. There is a noticeable lag between hitting the home button and when the homescreen appears and especially in opening the photo gallery, despite the Galaxy S 4 having one of the fastest processors in town.

PERFORMANCE

The Galaxy S 4 has all the hardware specifications and on paper is probably the most capable smartphone currently available in the market. But does it perform in the real world? First the positives. The display is insanely great and if it does fall short by any chance with default settings, it can be tweaked to the user’s satisfaction. The in-call audio quality is also among the best I have encountered. The 13-megapixel camera too is the best I have used on any Android smartphone and also beats the iPhone 5 in most situations.

Now the not so good things about the Galaxy S 4. I was hoping that ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture would translate into huge battery performance improvements but that wasn’t the case. I was almost able to see through a day of usage with an hour of calls and two hours of web browsing. It also included two email accounts and a Twitter and Facebook account, all set to push. Probably turning off the Air Gesture and Smart scroll and stay options would have provided some extra juice. Nevertheless, with my usage, I found the HTC One that runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600 processor to have better battery performance. Then there is the thing about its plasticky body, but like we have seen with the Galaxy S III it is not that big a deal breaker for most users.

Then there are a couple of things I just don’t like about the Galaxy S 4. The biggest one of them being all the gimmicks in the software that has not only eaten away precious internal storage but is also poorly executed. Also, in certain extreme conditions, I found the Galaxy S 4 to heat up alarmingly. While shooting for this review, I turned up the display’s brightness level to 100 percent and had the camera running for about five minutes when the top part of the phone became so hot it became uncomfortable to hold the phone. All phones heat up a little but I have never encountered a phone heating up to this level.

VERDICT

Despite its gimmicky software add-ons and plastic build, the Galaxy S 4 gets things that matter to most users right – the camera, display, in-call audio quality and to an extent, the battery. By throwing in a removable battery and a microSD card slot, many would be tempted to go for the Galaxy S 4 over the HTC One. All of these factors make the Galaxy S 4 a great choice at Rs 41,500.

More than the iPhone 5, I believe the Galaxy S 4 will compete with the HTC One. While HTC has gone all out with its premium build and numerous features like I pointed in my review of the One, Samsung is doing what it does best – create a mass market, ‘please everyone’ flagship smartphone. Both the devices target completely different sets of users with HTC gunning for the lifestyle segment while Samsung aiming for everyone else.

Photos: Eshan Shetty

The Lumia 620 is an incredibly important phone for Nokia. Not only it brings down the Windows Phone 8 experience to a level below Rs 15,000, but it also strives to bring a level of hardware and design sophistication to the price segment that no one else can. It is a very important product for Nokia as the Rs 12,000-15,000 price band is one of the fastest growing smartphone segment. Other top tier smartphone brands compromise on design, build quality and certain other features in this segment, while homegrown brands are hitting them hard with top-of-the-line specifications. Nokia is in a unique position not only with its Windows Phone 8 platform but also its insistence on a premium Lumia design language. Let us see if the Lumia 620 can compete with the manic march of cheap Android smartphones that are starting to hit the market with top draw specs. Read on to find out more.

Design

With the Lumia series Nokia is a gunning for design language by which the consumer can recognise that it is part of the Lumia family and unlike its 2011 product line there is no disconnect between some of the higher-end and lower-end models. The Lumia 620 may not have the unibody frame of the 920 or the glossy color palettes of the Lumia 820, but this is distinctly a Nokia Lumia phone. It is built using a double shot polycarbonate composite shell, that is removable. This is extremely similar to the Lumia 820 as the entire shell cocoons the innards of the device including the display. While the shell is essentially built using plastic, the quality of materials used is much higher than any Android smartphone in the price bracket. We were delivered the matte white model, and we found the matte finish on the model to be a dust magnet. The unit gathered a lot of dust and formed a brownish palette within a week.

As far as the dimensions are concerned, the Lumia 620 is neither the thinnest or the lightest phone out in the market. That’s not a bad thing and Nokia is also not gunning for size zero. At 127 grams it surely still is amongst the lighter smartphones in the market, but it is a bit thick at 11mm. However, its rather diminutive screen size masks the extra flab. The design itself is highly ergonomic and the phone can be easily used with a single hand and is very comfortable to operate over long periods, which is what eventually matters the most.

The front of the device is dominated by the 3.8-inch LCD panel. Below the screen the usual set of Windows Phone 8 capacitive keys can be found. Above the display, the VGA front facing camera and the regular set of camera sensors can be found. As far as the ports are concerned, a 3.5mm audio jack is placed on the top edge of the phone. The right side is home to the volume rockers, the power key and the camera shutter button. The keys are made up of the same enamel like material that we have already seen in devices like the Lumia 920. The bottom end of the device is home to the microUSB port. The back of the phone houses the 5-megapixel camera, an LED flash and the speakerphone.

Hardware

The Lumia 620 features the minimum hardware requirement for a Windows Phone 8 smartphone. That’s not to say it is an under-specced device, but at the same time it is not as capable as the Lumia 820 or the HTC 8X. It has a 3.8-inch WVGA display, a 1GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon Play CPU, 512MB of RAM, 8GB of internal memory, a microSD card slot, a 5-megapixel camera and an 1,300 mAh battery.

Due to the small footprint of the display, the pixel density is high but it is not the best in terms of the display quality. The colors are not particularly vibrant and the viewing angles are not the best in the business. But due to the pixel density it provides great readability, however that changes a bit in direct sunlight.

Another limitation of the hardware spec for the Lumia 620 is the meager 512 MB of RAM. Some newer Windows Phone 8 apps like Temple Run have a minimum 1GB RAM requirement, which means the Lumia 620 cannot run all Windows Phone 8 apps.

But these are the kind of trade-offs (display quality and RAM) one makes with most smartphones in this segment and it is not unique to the Lumia 620.

Software

Software wise, the Lumia 620 remains more less the same as its higher-end siblings the Lumia 920 and the Lumia 820. Essentially, Windows Phone 8 is a smooth unadulterated operating system, which means that the experience remains the same across a wide variety of devices and there is no difference in the software or the UI.

Nokia, however, adds a number of delicious features like City Lens, Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive, Mix Radio, and a number of apps that take advantage of the camera lens system in Windows Phone 8. So there is a mode called smart shoot that helps the user shoot the perfect picture and eliminate photo bombers. There is Cinematograph that shoots neat little GIF files, and there is even a Panorama mode.

Nokia Maps remain one of the best in the business and the Mix Radio app is a brilliant streaming app, which alone is a reason to invest in a Nokia Lumia phone.

Performance

When one takes a deep dive inside the specs of the Lumia 620, one realizes it is pretty low-end if compared to an Android smartphone of the same class. However, Windows Phone devices are not bound by the performance limitations of Android smartphones. It is a more nimble operating system and hence the combination of a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon Play processor and 512MB of RAM is more than enough to ensure smooth sailing. This means the Lumia 620 is an incredibly smooth phone to operate. Much more so than an Android smartphone in the same price range. Yes, a phone like the Micromax Canvas HD does come close, but still it’s a notch behind in terms of pure fluidity.

We encountered the odd freeze, but that did not actually tarnish the experience in our opinion. What bummed us was the meager RAM, just because we could not install a few apps. The extra RAM would also eliminated the rare performance glitch. The web browsing experience was a little slow in our opinion, but gestures like pinch to zoom and scrolling across web pages remained very smooth.

In terms of photography, the Lumia 620 turned out to be a capable shooter in daylight. The image quality was extremely good especially for a phone that costs so less. The colours were vibrant, and the images retained a decent amount of detail. In low-light, this was a different story. Obviously, the images retained a lot of noise and were grainy. But, that’s quite normal for a phone in the price bracket. Additionally, the number of camera lens’ plugins give the Lumia 620 an added edge over competing Android smartphones in the price range.

Call quality remained superlative, and we even managed to get a clear signal in the basement. From the very same point we used the LG Optimus G using the same SIM card and it failed calls. Battery life is normally a nemesis for smartphones these days, but the Lumia 620 is a certified champ. With 3G turned on and a lot of web browsing and social networking and calling the Lumia 620 easily crossed the 24 hour mark. At some times it would limp while crossing the 24 hour mark, but it would do so with grace. But, this was crazy heavy usage. We are talking about 4.5 hours of web browsing on 3G, lots of Twitter, Facebook and calling. If one returned to normal usage which involve around 1.5 hours of web browsing (a mix of 3G and Wi-Fi), lots of social networking, a bit of photography, streaming a lot of music via MixRadio (over 3G) and making around 20 calls (around 2 hours of talk time), then we are looking at around 28 to 30 hours of battery life, which is particularly nice indeed.

Verdict

For Rs 14,515, the Lumia 620 is a fantastic phone. It delivers smooth performance, a good camera, a solid ergonomic design which can also be customized and very good battery life. The lacking app ecosystem for Windows Phone 8 remains its chief drawback, which is further accentuated by its 512MB of RAM as some new apps require 1GB of RAM. Besides this, it may not appeal to people who want a larger screen as 3.8-inches does not cut it for many these days.

In our books, Nokia’s software suite spanning across camera add-ons, music store and navigation in itself is a great reason to buy the Lumia 620. However, if you want a bigger screen and access to more apps than the Android powered Micromax Canvas HD might be a decent bet at around the same price, but it will be unable to deliver the reliability and build of a Nokia and smooth navigation of Windows Phone 8.

Photo Credits: Sahil Mohan Gupta

People always ask me about the perfect or the best smartphone they can buy and I keep telling them there is no such thing as a perfect phone. No matter how much money you can throw away, you still cannot buy a phone that has got it all. Think about it – the iPhone 5, though very close to being one, still has a small display (for many) and there are restrictions around customizing the user interface. The Samsung Galaxy S III (and even the Galaxy S 4, for that matter) has all the specifications and a big display but does not look or feel premium enough with its plastic build.

The HTC One, on the other hand, gives the best of both worlds. Its design can rival that of the iPhone with premium materials and nice curves, while sporting hardware specifications comparable to that of the latest Galaxy smartphone. If that isn’t enough, HTC has also added some nifty hardware and software tweaks to make the experience even better. So can the HTC One be the perfect smartphone out there?

DESIGN

HTC has always been renowned for its premium design but they have taken industrial design to an altogether new level with the HTC One. The unibody aluminum build not only feels great to hold but is also sturdy enough to take a few falls without getting scratched or dented. The front dual-speakers add to the personality of the phone without making the device feel too tall to hold. The plastic insert around the edges doesn’t feel shabby and is covered elegantly with chamfered edges on either side, like the one found on the iPhone 5. The back houses a larger than normal camera opening flanked by an LED flash.

The lines on the back panel not only give the One a distinct feel but also act as the antenna for various radio chips inside the phone. These lines were required because of the aluminum body, which interferes with radio frequencies, but HTC managed to make them look like a part of the design language. I’m told the ring around the camera lens is actually for NFC.

At 143 grams, the One feels sturdy and substantial without getting too heavy to drag your shorts down when placed in its pocket. The curved back gives an illusion of it being thicker than it really is – 9.3 mm at its thickest point and roughly half of that at its thinnest at the edges.

Unlike most Android smartphones, the One only has two capacitive buttons below the display. For some reason, HTC has done away with the menu button and instead has the brand logo in center flanked by the back and home buttons on either side. It does take a bit of time getting accustomed to the arrangement and for the first couple of days I frequently found myself hitting the HTC logo when I wanted to hit the home button. One drawback of not having a dedicated menu button is that one has to rely on on-screen menu buttons, whose placement is not uniform across apps. The home button, in the meanwhile, also works for summoning Google Now by long-pressing it and the multi-tasking menu by double tapping it.

HARDWARE

The One is the greatest smartphone HTC has ever built and that shows in the hardware too. It runs on the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 quad-core processor clocked at 1.7GHz. It is by far the fastest chipset I have seen on a smartphone, which unlike the Nvidia Tegra processor found on the One X, does not heat up significantly, no matter what you throw at it. That processor combined with 2GB of RAM ensures that this phone would be relevant for a long time. Yes, there will be better and faster processors in the next couple of years, but I believe this configuration should be good enough for most tasks for at least two years from now. It comes with 32GB of internal storage of which approximately 25GB is available to users. There is no microSD card slot.

The 4.7-inch full HD display on the One is also the best I have ever come across on a smartphone. Being the smallest full HD display in the market ensures that the pixel density is as good as it can get. The viewing angles are great and so is the sunlight visibility. Yes, the contrast could have been better but colors look closer to real than what one finds on Samsung’s Super AMOLED displays.

Another impressive aspect of the One is the dual speakers, which HTC calls BoomSound. It is one of those things that makes me wonder why did not anyone think of this before. Rather than hiding the speaker on one of the edges or the back, HTC has placed them bang on the face above and below the display. There are two speakers rather than the usual one and the fine machine drilled holes for the speaker grills are a work of art on their own. The placement of the speakers ensure that they don’t get muffled irrespective of how the phone is held or kept on a surface. Unlike other speakers that sound tiny, these speakers are enough if you are watching a movie alone. I found them perfect for watch YouTube videos and movies, while I relied on a pair of headphones for listening to music. Like most HTC smartphones this also comes with Beats Audio enhancement.

The most controversial feature and one that HTC thinks is the phone’s highlight is its camera. At a time when rivals are embedding 13-megapixel sensors on their phones, HTC has given the One a lowly 4-megapixel camera. Still, it reckons that the One can click better photographs than most cameras as the sensor is bigger and can capture 300 percent more light per pixel than most cameras found on phones. With more light being captured, every single pixel contains more information and hence the term Ultrapixel. This is somewhat opposite of Nokia’s PureView technology that had a 41-megapixel sensor and oversampling was used to combine information from multiple pixels into one pixel.

During my usage, I found that the camera actually performed very well under low light conditions, capturing a lot of details while my iPhone 5 captured nothing. Unfortunately, I did not have a Lumia 920 to compare the results. Daytime photos, however, were a mixed bag – they were good for uploading on Facebook, for instance, but lacked details and sharpness when compared to those clicked with the iPhone 5. The HTC One’s camera would work great for people who mostly end up clicking photos in the evening or indoors, or those who simply click photos to share on Facebook and other social networking sites.

SOFTWARE

Reams have been written about HTC’s Sense UI layer on top of stock Android. Yes, there is nothing better than getting stock Android but Sense has been one of the more tolerable UI layer than others. The One introduces the fifth iteration of Sense and along with it BlinkFeed, which puts information directly on the homescreen. Think of BlinkFeed as having FlipBoard on your homescreen. The idea is that every time users unlock the phone they get news updates that are relevant to them without having to do anything after doing the initial setup. Users can choose to have their Facebook and Twitter feeds apart from news from hundreds of sources delivered on to their homescreen. They can even choose from different genres of news and only those delivered.

BlinkFeed is an interesting concept for those who don’t use many apps or for those who want to keep in touch with the latest updates every time they switch on their phones. Unfortunately, I am not one of them and I tend to get most of my updates from Twitter, for which I have a dedicated app. Having said that, I showed BlinkFeed to a few people and many of them were extremely receptive to the idea. While you cannot turn off BlinkFeed completely, you can sweep it to one side and program the phone to take you to a regular homescreen every time you hit the home button. This can be done by hitting the edit button on BlinkFeed homescreen and selecting the second homescreen as the default home.

Talking about software, HTC has also added a lot of goodies to the camera. There’s one called Zoe, which takes a three second video clip and 20 still shots from which users can select the exact frame they want. I believe this will come in handy for fast moving shots. HTC has also added tools like object remover and effects for editing photos. There are simply way too many options available to edit photos and get that perfect shot.

PERFORMANCE

The HTC One has been a bag full of surprises. Its performance has left me speechless and no matter how hard I pushed the device, it always came out on top. I could easily get over a day of battery life from the phone with about an hour of calls, four hours of web browsing, two Gmail accounts on push, one Twitter and one Facebook account, both with push notifications turned on. One weekend, when I made less than an hour of calls along with two hours of web browsing, I was able to squeeze 37 hours on a single charge with 8 percent battery still left. This is by far the best battery performance I have seen on any smartphone, leave aside any Android phone. The Galaxy Note II comes close, but then it is also a much bigger device. Having said that, I must add that it took me over four hours to charge the One’s 2,300mAH battery from zero to full. HTC needs to look into it and possibly go for some fast charging technology as it becomes impossible to fully charge the battery unless it is left for charging overnight.

Call quality was also above par, which I believe is due to multiple mics for noise cancelling, something that HTC calls HDR microphone. As mentioned earlier, the processor is among the fastest I have ever seen and does not heat as much as others when multitasking. Even the audio quality is above par and I find the dual-speakers on the front to be a great concept with flawless execution. The ultrapixel camera dazzles under low-light conditions but doesn’t really come out on the top in regular daylight photos.

VERDICT

Those who have been reading my reviews and following me on Twitter would probably already know that I am not a big fan of Android and have always found Android smartphones to be unreliable. I have struggled to find an Android smartphone that could rival the iPhone by giving a great combination of design, hardware, software and performance. Most Android smartphones with the hardware specifications are too big for my liking and lack any design sense. The ones that have good design lack in performance and battery life is usually dismal.

The HTC One changes all that for me. It has been over two weeks since I have been using the One as my primary phone and I don’t have the urge to go back to the iPhone 5, something that usually happens within the first couple of days of shifting to my review phone. At Rs 42,900, HTC has got the pricing right too.

With the right blend of design, hardware and performance, the HTC One is the closest thing to a perfect smartphone. It doesn’t get better than this. At least for now.

Photographs: Eshan Shetty

Large screens have proven to be very popular with customers, and smartphone OEMs are cashing on this trend big time. It’s interesting to see that not only the top draw global OEMs are making strides in this space, but also many smaller ones as well. Obviously, there is an armada of Chinese OEMs out there, but let’s not forget our local vendors. They are doing a good job undoubtedly as Micromax has proven with the Canvas HD. Spice too is another player in this space, and it has the Stellar Pinnacle which strives to cash in on the popularity of large screen smartphones. Let’s see if it can take on some of the other contenders in this battle.

Design

When I first got my hands on the Spice Stellar Pinnacle, I immediately thought about the HTC Sensation that came a couple of years ago. The resemblance in the industrial design was incredibly striking, yet the Pinnacle was clearly a much larger device that had foregone the classy aluminium build of the Sensation. However, one must admit, with its rounded corners and bronze colored metallic shell, the Stellar Pinnacle never comes off as a cheap looking device, it looks like a very well built device.

Obviously, due to its 5.3-inch display, the phone is monstrous. Spice is making use of capacitive touch controls which are placed on the bottom end of the display.

Above the display, we find the 5-megapixel front facing camera, a small LED notification light and the standard suite of sensors.

On the right hand side of the device, we have the volume rockers. There is even a camera shutter button, which is a rarity on Android smartphones these days. This is a nice touch indeed.

The top of the phone houses the power button which we feel is not the ideal choice in terms of ergonomics because reaching it requires the user to make some gymnastic moves with one’s hand. Weirdly, even the micro-USB port and the 3.5mm jack is placed right next to the power key, which makes the top of the device a wee bit crowded. That said, this also means the left and bottom ends of the device are bereft of any buttons or ports.

The back is home to the 8-megapixel camera, other than this, the back plate has a nice matte finish which feels nice to hold and not cheap.

Hardware

The Stellar Pinnacle may not be the most high-end smartphone in the market, but we believe it offers decent hardware for the price. It has a 5.3-inch display which has a qHD resolution. This converts to 206 pixels per inch. It is powered by a dual-core MediaTek SoC which is clocked at 1.2GHz. Additionally there is 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal memory along with a microSD card slot that is expandable by up to 32GB.

Its most unique calling card is its 5-megapixel front facing camera, but there is also a 8-megapixel camera in the rear as we have already pointed out.

It also has a rather massive battery which is rated at 2,550-mAh. One should note that this is rated higher than the original Samsung Galaxy Note and also bigger than rival smartphones like the Micromax Canvas HD, which competes in the same price band.

The display resolution on its own is a downer considering we are now starting to see 720p resolution displays quite consistently in the price range. Additionally, the display does not have the pop of an AMOLED panel and viewing angles per say were not that impressive. Colors too in our unit were pretty washed out and our review unit had a dead pixel too. That said, the dead pixel bit remains isolated to the review unit only and can be classified as a manufacturing defect, but still this is not very reassuring to say the least.

Software

Spice has not tinkered around a lot with the core Android experience on the Stellar Pinnacle. However, we will be remiss to point out that it ships with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box. We have heard that some of the newer units have been upgraded to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, but also this is being only done via the service center and it’s not an OTA update.

We found out that Spice has changed the default configuration of the capacitive menu buttons and the app switcher can only be engaged after a long press to the home button.

As far as add-on features are concerned, Spice has learnt from Samsung’s playbook as features like Direct Call, Picture in Picture are in play. It even has an intelligent call answer feature and the handset will automatically receive the call if it is placed near the ear. Vice-versa, it also disconnects or mutes the call if the phone is flipped on the screen.

The biggest stumbling block remains the older version of Android, and the upgrade process which cannot be enforced by the average user without making a trip to the service center.

Performance

In our testing we found the Spice Stellar Pinnacle to be incredibly spritely. For a phone of this class the performance was buttery smooth and mind you we were not even using device Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Of course, it did have a relatively capable chipset beneath it in form of the 1.2GHz dual-core MediaTek CPU, supplemented by 1GB of RAM and a PowerVR SGX 531 GPU. Additionally, the rather low resolution of the display should also be considered, as this would have definitely helped the device to perform better than rivals on similar hardware but with higher resolution displays.

Suffice to say we were more than satisfied with the performance of the handset. It even managed to run games like Dead Trigger with much trouble and the frame rates never skipped a beat. Obviously, Nvidia Tegra 3 class graphics should not be expected, but for most this will be more than sufficient.

The camera performance of the device was at best patchy. The low-light performance of the rear camera was nothing spectacular, but that has to be expected at this price point. But if one compares the performance to say a Micromax Canvas HD then it is definitely inferior. In outdoor conditions the performance was much better, but again the images were a tad washed out, if we were to put it mildly. Video performance of the device was average at best, and it could not be compared to the likes of the Micromax Canvas HD.

As far as the 5-megapixel front facing camera was concerned, we found that the resolution advantage was a boon for better quality portraits, but other than that we did not find it to be much of an advantage. That said, the resolution advantage is a big deal if one intends to use these images for social networks as lower sub 5-megapixel resolutions make for poor imaging.

The battery life was average at best as we struggled to last the day on a single charge. Obviously our testing included two Gmail accounts, Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp, SMS, a few calls, a bit of web browsing, playing the odd game and a bit of photography. We kept 3G always on, and we never used the device without 3G. This amounted to around 10.5 hours of battery life on an average over a period of two weeks, which is not adequate for a power user in our opinion. One can obviously get more out of the battery if the phone is used more conservatively or apps like Juice Defender are used to control the radios, sensors, display brightness and location services.

Call quality remained decent. It was more less similar as the Micromax Canvas HD, but not quite at the levels one would expect from a tier one brand.

Verdict

At a price of Rs 13,990, the Spice Stellar Pinnacle offers good design and decent build quality when compared to similarly priced phones from other Indian vendors. The front-facing 5-megapixel camera is a unique proposition. However, the display resolution and camera quality leaves much to be desired, especially if one compares it with the Micromax Canvas HD, which is priced similarly. Nokia’s Lumia 620 could also be a possible alternative for those who are not constrained by the operating system.

Photographs: Rohit Sharma

The iPad may have the lion’s share of the high-end market, but there remains a massive market for a low-cost tablet. Android of course has also matured into a viable tablet operating system, especially for 7-inch tablets. In 2013 we have witnessed a number of decent options in the market. The Acer Iconia B1 is perhaps one of the notable models considering it hits price points that are comparable to many a local OEM made tablet, but the difference being that it comes from Acer, one of the largest laptop OEMs in the world. We have given it the full Monty, read on to find out if it’s any good.

Design

At such a low price point, some design finesse goes out of the question. It is a pretty bland blue and black slab which is made of pretty cheap plastic. The build as one might expect with such a low-cost tablet is pretty questionable, and in some respects one will be better off going for an indigenous tablet because we have seen better build quality at such price points.

The biggest advantage of the plastic build is the super lightweight. At 320 grams, it certainly is super portable, but then again it feels pretty fragile. It starts creaking even on applying the slightest bit of pressure to the chassis. The facia of the Iconia B1 is a pretty standard affair. Acer maintains the button-less ethos as all the Android UI controls are software based. The bezel is pretty narrow for a tablet of this class. Personally, we are not big fans of the glossy blue and black, but that’s not a deal breaker.

As far as the ports are concerned, the micro-USB slot is on the bottom end of the device along with the microSD card slot which is covered with a plastic insert. The volume rockers and the power button are on the right hand side of the tablet. There is a VGA front-facing camera that will come in handy for video chatting purposes.

Hardware

Specs-wise the Iconia B1 is not a trend setter. It has a 1024×600 pixel 7-inch display which is okay for the price, and it is powered by a dual-core MediaTek processor clocked at 1.2GHz. Additionally, there is 512MB of RAM, and there is 8GB of internal storage.

The display is our opinion was a tad washed out, and one could argue that Acer could have provided a slightly better quality panel. Just to be clear we are not complaining about the resolution which converts to a decent 170 PPI, but just viewing angles and general color reproduction of the panel. That said, if one plans on using it for reading purposes then it will more than suffice, though consumption of video will be problematic. But that’s what one gets at its price point.

Software

The Iconia B1 runs a pretty stock version of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, which is always a good thing in our opinion. Obviously, considering, it’s a low-cost tablet, any added bloat of a software skin will be detrimental to the user experience. Apart from some extra shortcut menus in the drop down notification menu, we did not notice any customization.

Software-wise, it will appeal to the Android purist, but if you are looking for extra software goodies then this is clearly not the tablet for you. That said, Google Now offers a number of apps of its own that can be downloaded from the Play Store that can make the Iconia B1 experience pretty enriching. For instance, now on Google Play users can download the very awesome Play Books app for e-reading, but if that’s not enough then the Amazon Kindle app is always a safe bet. Furthermore, Play Movies are also now supported in India, and there is a lot of video content to be had from there.

Obviously, with Android Jelly Bean, one also gets access to the fantastic Google search experience, which combines the power of voice search, the Google Knowledge graph, and the contextual information system, Google Now.

That said, considering the limited hardware, one does wonder if it will receive an update to Android 4.2 or maybe even Android 5.0.

Performance

After a point of time, running synthetic benchmarks on a low-cost tablet becomes a futile attempt. Why? Because, the user experience is what matters, and benchmarks especially for low-cost tablets do little to prove the real world utility of the product. That said, we ran a few like Quadrant, which unwittingly crashed on us. That said, the performance is passable for something that costs south of Rs 8,000.

It’s not that it hanged on us incessantly, but it was a little lazy in opening apps. Sometimes the touch response would be a little unresponsive, but all this is normal for a device of this class. Our major pickle was with the way the web browsing experience was little too slow for our tastes. Plus pinch to zoom was almost always a hit or miss affair. Perhaps, this was an issue with our unit only, but other than this little glitch, the performance was comparable to any tablet in the price point.

Battery life was also pretty good. By no means it was iPad like, but we could browse the web for about 5.5 hours at a stretch and this even involved bit of video.

Verdict

The Acer Iconia B1 offers solid software, decent specs and decent performance in a package that costs Rs 7,999. However, the build quality of the product is questionable. If one is in the market for a low-cost tablet, then looking at the Acer Iconia B1 is prudent considering it comes from a reliable company like Acer, but at the same time one should remember that at this price pont it’s possible to get a slightly higher specced and better built tablet from the likes of Micromax, Wickedleak, Karbonn and Spice. Additionally, if you are willing to spend a little more then the Asus MeMo Pad 7 is a decent option at Rs 9,999 and that product certainly is superior to the Iconia B1 in terms of build quality.

Photographs: Rohit Sharma

2013, is not a time when one uses physical media to consume content. We stream videos, we download videos, and same goes for music and basically most of our content is driven by the Internet. But our televisions, at least in most Indian homes, don’t leverage the power of the Internet. Yes some will argue new Smart TVs have such capabilities built-in, but most of them are obscenely priced well beyond the average Indian, and the user interface used by most of these TVs are far from ideal. So what’s the solution? Well, Amkette believes the EVO TV XL is the answer, and on paper it definitely looks like one. The EVO TV XL is a small Android powered box, that connects with one’s TV, offers a gamut of connectivity options, and can play most media formats and more importantly heralds a very interesting user interface concept. While all this sounds good on paper, but does it really pull through for the consumer? Read on to find out.

What’s in the Box?

The EVO TV XL is an innocuous looking box that resembles an Apple TV from a distance. In fact, it looks identical to its predecessor, the EVO TV. It’s a pretty unassuming device with its gun barrel grey look, but once we take a closer look at it, there are four USB ports that come in handy for all sorts of capabilities, a HDMI port for a connection with the big screen and there is also a SD card reader. It’s worth noting that no other multimedia box in the market offers so many USB inputs, so this is a very nice touch. It also has a SPDIF, an Ethernet out and an AV out. Because of so many connectivity options, the EVO TV can be very easily loaded up with content and hooked up with peripherals. Amkette also throws in a very high quality HDMI cable for good measure, which is also pretty lengthy.

Internally, it’s powered by an ARM Cortex A9 CPU clocked at 1GHz and has a Mali-400 GPU and 1GB of RAM. This basically ensures the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich experience is pretty seamless for most multimedia activities.

And then there is the ‘Air Mouse’ that is the make or break deal for the EVO TV XL. Amkette calls the Air mouse, the EVO Touch controller. Amkette is betting big on this apparatus that allows the user to navigate the Android home-screen using a combination of gestures and some manual button controls similar to what one might do via the Microsoft Kinect or the Nintendo Wii.

The build of the Air Mouse is solid and has a certain heft that feels reassuring. The design is ergonomic so that the user can comfortably hold it in one’s palm for long periods. Additionally, it also houses a high quality microphone, which means if one hooks up a web camera to the EVO TV XL, it becomes a handy Skyping or video conferencing tool.

User Interface

Amkette has totally customized the Android UI, which in this case is a good thing as it is optimized for the large screen. Essentially, the home-screen has been flooded with a gamut of tiles, that act like giant folders holding genre centric applications or content. So the games tile houses games like Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds, the TV tile has a curated YouTube mode that delivers local content that is already available on YouTube in an organized and curated fashion, making content discovery a breeze and there is a multi-media tile for accessing the video and audio features.

As it is powered by Android, the EVO TV XL is basically an Internet connected box, so there is web browser, users can download games and applications from the Play Store and Amkette has even added a ticker for weather updates and news, which basically appears on the home-screen and keeps the user up to date with the latest information.

The core UI is dependent on horizontal swipe gestures using the Air Mouse and in my testing I found while there was a bit of learning curve, the interface was very responsive and intuitive once the I became accustomed to it.

I handed control of the EVO TV XL to my 85-year-old grandfather and he was easily browsing the web using a bluetooth keyboard, and playing movies of the EVO TV XL within 45 minutes, which speaks volumes about the simplicity of the UI.

As a Multimedia box

At the end of the day the EVO TV XL is a multimedia box. Most people will disregard its Android functionality, but will see it as a means to easily watch movies on the big screen. For that matter, the EVO TV XL shined in my tests. I threw a ton of movies in varying formats and it easily played them. May it be a .MKV file, a .MP4, a .AVI file or .FLAC audio, it played them all easily.

That said, I noticed that hooking up a powered external hard drive, the performance tended to dwindle massively as the video would stutter or freeze at times as the hardware powering the EVO TV XL would not read the loaded HDD fast enough. But there are no issues with a standard laptop class external drive or USB, however the read times could be better. Another advantage is the fact it has a SD card slot so users can easily transfer content from memory cards.

It also supports DLNA streaming, so the content does not have to be stored locally, it can be streamed over the Wi-Fi network. Unfortunately, in my testing while it worked well across the PC or Mac, it failed to recognize the PlayStation 3 Media Center. We believe this to be a minor issue as this can be rectified via a software fix.

Support for the XBMC media center is one of the main draws behind the new EVO TV XL and at this moment the implementation is not very stable. However, when it works properly, its a joy, because users can pull up all sorts of extra content related to the movie or TV show one is watching. May it be, reviews, summaries, cover-art, subtitles, there is a lot to be gained out here.

But the most surprising thing about the Amkette EVO TV XL is its potential as a gaming machine. The Air Mouse is perfect for consuming mobile games. Suffice to say, chopping fruits on Fruit Ninja was never this much fun on a touch-screen. It feels as if the game was designed for the Air Mouse.

Verdict

Rarely do home HD media players excite us this much. And this is not even because of the core multimedia functionality, it’s because of the new Air Mouse implementation which works remarkably well and because of its Android underpinnings, the EVO TV also becomes a decent gaming machine. In fact, if you have been bitten by the Smart TV bug, then its not the TV you are looking for, you are looking for the Amkette EVO TV XL.

At Rs 10,500 it is a good deal cheaper than the Western Digital TV Live, but that product comes with a built-in 1TB HDD, so that’s something a consumer will need to take into account. Then there is the Apple TV, which is now officially available in India for Rs 8,295. However, if you are looking for that all-in-one Smart TV experience, then the EVO TV XL is the one to go for because of the flexibility of Android, the unique user interface and the sheer number of connectivity options.

Samsung pioneered the phablet concept with the original Galaxy Note. It was an unexpected success as most in the tech media scoffed at the ludicrous form-factor, but Samsung knew better and it turned out to be one hell of a home run. Of course, the Note and its successor the Note II were geared at the top end of the market and many local vendors have started emulating Samsung’s product at much lesser price points, so it was obvious Samsung had to respond in kind. Its answer is the Galaxy Grand. It achieves a sort of middle ground between the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II at 5-inches, but hits a price point that’s much more tenable to the average consumer by dropping a few features but still maintaining Samsung’s software features. Things are not easy for Samsung because its lesser-known rivals are becoming nimbler and offering products that are technically superior hardware wise, so the Galaxy Grand is an odd-ball, but is it worth the trouble? Read on to find out more.

Design

The Galaxy Grand is a typical Samsung device, using the same design language that Samsung introduced with the Galaxy S III and has refined it for the 5-inch form factor. This way the device looks like a hybrid between the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II. Of course, the glossy hyperglaze plastic build is still in play and the sides are tapered with a chrome colored plastic finish. Like most Samsung smartphones the Galaxy Grand is very thin at 9.6mm and weighs only 162 grams. There are no surprises here.

Samsung opted to make the Galaxy Note II taller and narrower, which made it more ergonomic when compared to the original Galaxy Note, but the Galaxy Grand is certainly broader and is not as ergonomic for one-handed use as the Galaxy Note II. That said, it certainly is a good deal better than the Galaxy Note, which now feels a little bulky. However, when compared to a device like the Micromax Canvas HD, then again it loses out, however it does come on top by a slight margin in terms of build quality.

The façade of the Grand is dominated by the large 5-inch display, which has a rather underwhelming WVGA resolution. The bottom end of the display has the large Samsung home button, which is flanked by a menu and back key. The top houses the 2-megapixel front-facing camera and the standard suite of sensors. In typical, Samsung style, the power button is placed on the right side, and is flanked by the volume rocker.

On the bottom of the device, we have the micro-USB slot, which also doubles as the charging point and the top houses the 3.5mm jack. The rear of the Galaxy Grand reveals the 8-megapixel camera, which is supplemented with a flash.

Once we managed to peel off the back cover, we found the 2,100-mAh battery, dual-SIM slots and the microSD card slot. Overall, the Galaxy Grand is everything one expects of a Samsung device, glossy plasticky, big, and yet sturdy. Groundbreaking is one thing it is not.

Hardware

The Galaxy Grand is decidedly a mid-range rocker. In fact, it is actually in a way a refurbished Galaxy S II with a larger display. Why? Because minus the 5-inch WVGA display, it retains the same dual-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz, the same 8-megapixel camera and all this is tied with 1GB of RAM. As far as the memory is concerned it has 8GB of internal memory, which can be expanded via a microSD card slot.

These are not very high-end specs and if one is looking to gloat about specs then we’d wager, the Micromax Canvas HD will be a much better deal as it has a more power efficient quad-core processor and has a 720p display in comparison to a the underwhelming WVGA resolution.

This becomes quite apparent because the text is not as crisp as the Micromax Canvas HD and it looks slightly pixilated. Additionally, there is a weird yellow hue to the Galaxy Grand’s display, which makes it slightly unpleasant.

Software

If hardware is not the greatest strength of the Galaxy Grand then software definitely is its moment in the sun. Actually, the premise behind a device like the Galaxy Grand was to provide the large screen and software experience found in some of the higher-end Samsung phones but at a more affordable price.

While it runs on Android 4.1, Samsung TouchWiz experiences like S-Note, Multi-view, Smart Stay and ChatOn messenger are all present. Additionally, nifty modifications in the contacts UI allow users to swipe left or right to choose either to call or message a contact. Another advantage of TouchWiz is the camera UI, which is simple yet offers the users a number of settings to tweak.

TouchWiz also delivers a superlative stock keyboard and when that is combined with the broad form-factor of the Grand, we have one typing road-runner. Samsung also bundles the Galaxy Grand with 50 GB of DropBox storage and overall, there is definitely extra value in the TouchWiz experience, but this comes at the cost of fast Android updates, loads of irritating blooping sounds that need to be turned off manually and a gaudy looking cartoony user interface. That said, Samsung has a great track record of updating its software and that’s something we cannot say about an OEM like Micromax, which makes the superb Canvas HD.

Performance

While the Galaxy Grand may not deliver jaw-dropping performance of say the upcoming Galaxy S 4, but it is no slouch. People who think that the quad-core chip on Canvas HD is superior to the dual-core chip on the Galaxy Grand are very mistaken. The SoC on the Galaxy Grand is based on a higher performance ARM Cortex A9 architecture, while the quad-core chipset on the Canvas HD is based on a more frugal ARM Cortex A7 architecture.

In terms of everyday performance, the Galaxy Grand does tend to show the odd lag, but we are guessing that’s more to do with the heavy duty TouchWiz UI rather than it being a folly of the chipset. In terms of pure benchmark performance, both the Galaxy Grand and the Canvas HD are neck and neck. The Canvas HD, however, does win by a sliver.

While the Canvas HD scores in excess of 4000 on Quadrant, the Galaxy Grand scores around 3,600. In the AnTuTu benchmark the Galaxy Grand scored a decent 7074 and a decent 3047 in the Browsermark test.

The camera disappointed in low-light performance and we think that the Canvas HD has a better camera for low-light situations, but in daylight the performance was much better and was closer to the Galaxy S III.

Perhaps the biggest selling point of the Galaxy Grand should be its battery life as it coasted through the day without breaking a sweat. Its battery life was much better than the Micromax Canvas HD even though both have similar sized batteries. We ran a loop of Batman Begins at 720p resolution and it lasted about 6 hours. For more basic testing we just used the device as our daily driver and we used the device to text, make calls, browse the web, play games and click pictures and the device handily lasted the day on a single charge. Mind you this was much better than the Galaxy S III and the Micromax Canvas HD.

Samsung continues to use the call forwarding dual-SIM system and not the dual-active system. This means calls are forwarded from the inactive number to the active number, which results in the user incurring carrier charges.

Verdict

In the end, the Galaxy Grand is meant for a person who aspires for the software features of a Galaxy Note II, but cannot afford it. It may not set the house on fire with its specs but it is a rock solid workhorse. It has many features that make the likes of the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II compelling options, but then again its rivals are better speced and hence are better performers.

That said, Samsung has good after sales, it delivers Android updates faster than most OEMs, it has great battery life and its software features are definitely differentiators. If it’s the hardware one is after then the Galaxy Grand is not meant for you, then you’ll better off buying the Micromax Canvas HD which costs Rs 14,990, which Rs 6,500 more cheaper than the Galaxy Grand which is priced at a not so cheap Rs 21,500.

Photographs: Rohit Sharma

If Samsung’s Galaxy range of smartphones are anything to go by, you don’t really need premium hardware or insane features to taste runaway Android smartphone success. All you need is smart pricing and billions of advertising dollars. Sony, much like HTC, tries to buck the trend with the Xperia Z that boasts premium design, top-of-the-line hardware specifications and some water resistance for added measure. A price tag of approximately Rs 39,000 doesn’t feel steep either, especially with its chief competitor – the HTC Butterfly – priced at Rs 46,000. But will it be enough for Sony to make people believe in the Japanese brand once again? It is about time we find out.

DESIGN

At a time when every phone looks alike with some kind of plastic body with rounded corners and curved back, the Xperia Z is a big departure. Like the iPhone 4/4S and the Nexus 4, the Xperia Z features a tempered glass back that looks premium and different. The black version looks better than the white one, but both variants stand out and won’t leave people guessing which phone you are holding. It is very much like the iPhone – it has a distinct persona of its own and screams trademark Sony (not Sony Ericsson) design language of straight lines.

The edges also have a lining of tempered glass and all ports are hidden with flaps that provide the much advertised water resistance. In fact, it took me a while to find out the micro USB charging port, which doesn’t have any marking, unlike other ports. The phone feels extremely solid and as expected it doesn’t creak or rattle when held in a tight grip.

While the combination of straight lines and flat back looks good, holding the phone is a different matter altogether. Despite shaving off the bezel, any phone with a 5-inch display is difficult to maneuver with one hand and in this case the lack of curvature doesn’t help. I found the edges to be a bit too sharp for my comfort, though the corners have been subtly rounded off. Apple can have an iPhone with a flat back solely because of its smaller footprint, which certainly isn’t the case with the Xperia Z. Ironically, it was Sony Ericsson that introduced the “human curvature” with its Xperia smartphones, something that probably got lost in translation somewhere.

Another gripe I have with the design is the placement of the speaker on the lower right edge, which ensures that it is muffled every time you hold the phone in your right hand. You just cannot miss covering the speaker with the fleshy part of the palm.

HARDWARE

Android smartphones in the last couple of years have entered a specification arms race with brands trying to strike a fine balance between having the latest and greatest specifications possible while forgetting about the user experience. That reflects in the marketing as well, which is focused on hardware specifications like processor, display size, internal memory and megapixels without really thinking about whether they would really make a difference in the user’s life.

That’s not to blame Sony for putting the best possible specifications on its flagship smartphone but somewhere they seem to have lost the message of why one needs top-notch hardware. Take the 5-inch full HD 1080p display with Bravia engine enhancement, for instance. The Xperia Z has the best display I have encountered on a smartphone when viewed front-on but the viewing angles are terrible – an issue that has plagued Xperia smartphones in the past and I hoped Sony would fix it by investing in better quality displays especially when it attempts a comeback. Despite having the Bravia Engine at work, I find the HTC Butterfly to have a better display. Considering that the display is what you’d end up interacting with all the time, this is bit of a let down.

Display aside, rest of the specs are top-of-the-line, especially the combination of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 Pro quad-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz combined with 2GB of RAM. It essentially chews and spits everything thrown at it with no lag. Some might find it an overkill but this firepower is required for some processor intensive tasks like HDR video recording among others.

Talking about the camera, the 13.1-megapixel camera churns out good shots provided you have optimum lighting condition. Daytime shots are comparable with any other high-end smartphone but it is the indoor and low-light shots that leave much to be desired. Photos taken outdoors at night and indoors in low-light are average at best, which can’t be compared with even the iPhone 5, forget the Lumia 920. If you were looking for a bigger proof that megapixel count isn’t everything, look no further. Image stabilization mostly worked and I even tried shooting video in HDR mode, which works in certain extreme conditions (shooting under direct sunlight, for instance). I believe this will soon become a common feature in most high-end smartphones.

SOFTWARE

The Xperia Z runs on Android Jelly Bean 4.1.2, which isn’t the latest version but that is par for the course. Sony has promised to update it to 4.2 soon and the company has been pretty prompt with its updates in the past. I like the fact that the UI on top of stock Android is minimal and that Sony has gone with onscreen navigation controls than having three buttons below the display.

There is a bit of bloatware in form of Sony’s own web apps apart from McAfee antivirus. Sony has said that the Xperia Z will come with some music store offering but my review unit didn’t have it.

Sony has also added a “Stamina Mode” as a software feature, which the company claims could potentially quadruple the battery performance of the phone. The feature essentially kills all background updates while the display is turned off and saves battery during standby mode. It is a nice addition for non-power users and it is customizable too to add apps to the whitelist that can access the Internet during that time.

PERFORMANCE

During my testing that lasted for a week I could barely pass through 15 hours with my heavy usage with two email ids, a Twitter account, about two hours of calls and about four hours of Internet usage. I had both 3G and Wi-Fi turned on and had switched off the Stamina Mode. With similar usage, the HTC Butterfly lasted me for slightly almost 22 hours. Having said that, switching on the stamina mode improves the performance drastically. The Xperia Z should easily see through a day of medium usage.

I did not experience any lag whatsoever and the phone essentially would take on any app or game currently available on Android Play Store with no difficulties. I did not face any problem with the call quality and neither did I face any call drops. It performs its job as a phone.

VERDICT

The Xperia Z is really a mixed bag kind of device. The design is pretty but has its own set of flaws. The camera has the highest resolution sensor available in the market on an Android smartphone today but its performance is average. The battery performs above par if you are willing to sacrifice being online at all times. The display has the highest pixel density on a smartphone (for now) but suffers from poor viewing angles.

The only thing that really works for the Xperia Z is its pricing but that is more about HTC failing to price the Butterfly sensibly. It is water resistant too but it remains to be seen whether that is a killer feature for which buyers would choose the Xperia Z.

And let’s not forget the elephant in the room – the Samsung Galaxy S IV, which will be unveiled on March 14 and should be available in India sometime in April, if the Galaxy S III roll-out from last year is taken as a precedence. Add to it the HTC One that is also getting launched in India in April and the Xperia Z starts looking a generation old already.

Photographs: Rohit Sharma

Once a pioneer of email-centric pagers, BlackBerry changed the enterprise communication space with its range of smartphones that handled emails and IMs like no one’s business. A mainstay of almost every executive in the world, one could not help but see BlackBerry smartphones holstered in trouser belts at airports, that is if users were not thumbing madly at the QWERTY keypad, punching emails or quick BBMs. Despite the launch of the iPhone, BlackBerry did manage to keep chugging along, content in the knowledge that it dominated the enterprise space and iPhone and Android smartphones did not have the trust-factor that BlackBerry enjoyed. Instead the company started targeting the youth, offering them cheap BBM plans and not having a BlackBerry in college could mean missing out on a lot of things usually shared on BBM groups.

But BlackBerry knew it could not remain complacent for long and had to come up with touchscreen smartphones. Yes, it had a loyal user base that swore by its keypads (it still has them) but BlackBerry had to do something drastic to attract new users who were attracted to the iPhone and the legion of Android smartphones. BlackBerry tried its luck with touchscreen in the Storm series that failed miserably thanks to its irritating click-touchscreen. It followed it up with the Torch series that too did not do well in the market – the software wasn’t optimized and froze often and the devices had terrible battery performance. BlackBerry had to come up with something drastically new as its operating system was not good enough to take on a modern smartphone. It did just that – BlackBerry acquired QNX, a highly scalable operating system on top of which it would build its next generation operating system.

Things did not start on the right footing as the company found it difficult to integrate its BlackBerry services on the new platform. The project was marred by multiple delays and the PlayBook tablet running on QNX did miserably in the market. Heck, it was the first BlackBerry device that did not have a native email client, forget BBM integration. There were no usable apps and there was very little one could do with it apart from browsing the web and playing multimedia content. BlackBerry acquired TAT, a company that specialized in creating graphically rich user interfaces to give a brand new UI and look for its BlackBerry 10 platform. And here we are, reviewing the first BlackBerry 10 smartphone, the Z10, to see if BlackBerry has done enough to save itself. Let’s dive in…

DESIGN

The BlackBerry Z10 is a departure from the typical BlackBerry design, which is a great thing. It does not have any resemblance to the Torches and the Storms of yore, and instead shares more design cues with the PlayBook. It sports a metal and glass front with a rubberized plastic back with a dimpled pattern. The device feels good to hold and sturdy enough to withstand a fall or two. With a 4.2-inch display, it is perfectly designed to be used with one hand, unlike most smartphones these days that sport massive displays and expect users to undergo mutation to be able to use them. In my opinion, BlackBerry has hit the sweet spot with a display that’s just right and a form-factor that’s perfect to use as a smartphone.

Another thing users will notice is that the Z10 is devoid of any buttons on its face. There is no home button or a back key or any kind of indication of a menu key. The only buttons on the entire device are the power button on the top and the typical three-way volume rocker on the right edge. That’s about it. It’s a good thing that the designers have kept the surface clean, but I would have preferred a dedicated camera shutter button. Having said that, most smartphones these days are omitting the camera shutter button. On the ports front, there is a 3.5mm audio port on the top, along with microUSB and miniHDMI ports on the left edge.

One thing that really stands out, however, are the relatively thick bezels around the display. At a time when most smartphones are coming with as thin as possible bezels, the Z10 has really thick ones, especially at the top and bottom. It might seem as an overkill to have the BlackBerry logo occupying so much space just below the display adding to the overall footprint. But there is a good reason for that and I will come to it in the software section of the review.

Overall, I find the overall design quite appealing and though it might evoke some memories of the iPhone 5′s overall design, it does a good enough job to excite people while being functional at the same time.

HARDWARE

Much like Windows Phone, BlackBerry has managed to find the right specifications that are optimized for the platform. The hardware specifications of the BlackBerry Z10 might look dated, they work really well for BlackBerry 10. The Z10 is powered by a dual-core Qualcomm Krait processor clocked at 1.5GHz. This combined with 2GB of RAM ensures that things move at a fast clip. In the few days that I used the device, I didn’t encounter a frozen screen or apps closing unexpectedly.

The 4.2-inch display has a resolution of 1280×768 pixels which pegs it at a pixel density of about 355ppi. Yes, the WXGA display might sound pedestrian on paper, but works really well for the Z10 considering it is a relatively smaller display than most Android smartphones that sport 720p or higher displays. The viewing angles are great and the display is bright enough to be legible under direct sunlight.

The 8-megapixel camera on the rear is accompanied by an LED flash but sadly, there is hardly anything to write home about, especially if one has used the likes of the iPhone 5 or the Lumia 920. The performance is ordinary and heavily dependent on the lighting conditions. There is a Time Shift feature that clicks shots in a burst mode and recognizes faces. Users can then tap individual faces and see different shots to get the right expression. It works mostly but is dependent on whether the camera recognizes a face. It is not a new feature and Nokia Lumia smartphones too have it under Group Shot. Both the solutions are driven by Scalado’s technology.

The onboard speaker is impressive and loud enough to listen to calls over the speakerphone indoors. Music playback over the speaker is also surprisingly good and sound does not feel tiny. This was quite surprising as some early reviews had indicated the speaker not being loud enough. There is 16GB of onboard storage along with a microSD card slot. The back cover also houses the NFC chip.

SOFTWARE

The big deal about the Z10 is not the design or the hardware but rather the new BlackBerry 10 operating system. A lot is riding on BlackBerry 10 and it could eventually be the make or break deal for the company. However, that is not saying BlackBerry’s future rests on the success of the Z10 alone as there are more devices in the line-up, especially the Q10.

Anyway, BlackBerry 10 does have a learning curve, steep or not depends on whether the user has used a touchscreen smartphone before. This is especially critical for existing BlackBerry users as there are no back or home buttons to help navigate through the user interface. Users essentially have to learn four basic gestures to master BlackBerry 10. Swiping upwards from the bottom edge of the display will take them to the home screen, which essentially shows the last eight running apps. Swiping from top to bottom in any app will show more options in the app and swiping from one side to another will navigate different screens.

The most important gesture, however, is to swipe from the bottom of the display to the middle and drag the thumb towards the right. This will first give a peek into notifications and dragging to the right edge of the display opens the BlackBerry Hub, where users can check email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other notifications. The UI is not as difficult as it sounds and I was able to master it in a matter of a couple of hours.

Then there is the new BBM, which does not require any BlackBerry plan anymore. Users can now subscribe to regular data plans from their carrier and use it both for BBM and Internet browsing. BBM gets a couple of new features in BlackBerry 10, like the ability to video calls a la FaceTime and also share the phone’s screen with other BBM users. However, I wasn’t able to try out this feature as none of my contacts had a BlackBerry 10 device, yet.

Another key feature of BlackBerry 10 is its onscreen keypad with a text prediction system, which is better than anything I have ever seen before. After just two days of usage, there were situations where I didn’t have to type a word and just pick up the relevant words and “flick” them from the keypad. It takes time getting used to but then becomes really addictive. Hopefully, BlackBerry users who are used to a physical keypad would appreciate this feature, till the Q10 is launched.

However, BlackBerry 10 does have a few kinks, some of which could become big problems for the platform in the long term. Peek is a creative alternative to a drop down notification bar but becomes more of a pain to use over a period of time. The basic problem is that the notification icons on the homescreen lead to nowhere, they are just an indication that there is new stuff that you’d like to see. Going into Hub from the homescreen takes the user to the last item they checked rather than the new stuff that has been received. Then the user needs to reach the Hub page and individually see all the notifications. This needs to be fixed on an urgent basis.

I believe it can be fixed in the next update to BlackBerry 10. However, one that cannot be fixed is the app situation. In order to boost the number of apps in time for the Z10 launch, BlackBerry encouraged developers to port their apps from other platforms. It even held “portathon” events where developers ported a few thousand apps in 24 hours flat. Obviously, the quality is lacking and the Android ports are just terrible. Yes, there are a few apps that have been built specifically for BlackBerry 10 but those are few and far between and finding them on the app store is not easy.

Talking about content, BlackBerry says it will offer a music store in India as well, but it was not live during the time I had the Z10 for review. However, users can check out the music content selection here.

PERFORMANCE

BlackBerry 10 is a mixed bag of sorts. I really dig the UI, provided an update fixes the few kinks that exist. The browser performed well most of the times and I was even able to watch Sony’s live stream of the PlayStation 4 on it, which I don’t believe is possible on any other mobile browser.

The Z10, in itself is a pretty decent device. It looks good, feels good to hold and performs most of the tasks brilliantly. The battery lasted me for about 15 hours on an average with two email accounts, one Twitter and Facebook account, two hours of calls and an hour of music listening. Relatively, it is about the same battery performance that I would expect from a Windows Phone smartphone.

VERDICT

The Z10 is a good start for BlackBerry’s new operating system. But it has to answer two key questions for BlackBerry – will it excite existing BlackBerry users and will it tempt Android or iPhone users to jump ship? The answer to the first question is a little tricky. BlackBerry 10 is a great improvement over BlackBerry 7 operating system and brings in a modern platform, which is almost at par in terms of performance with market leaders. There are a lot of new additions and the new BBM in itself is a great reason to go for it.

However, I’m not sure if the Z10 without a physical QWERTY keypad is the right choice to attract existing BlackBerry users. I spoke to a few of them and all of them said they would have preferred one with a QWERTY keypad to get accustomed to the new UI. Probably BlackBerry should have launched the Q10 along with the Z10 to ensure users have choice.

As far as attracting users from other platforms, I believe BlackBerry 10 will still take a while to reach that stage. The app ecosystem is still being developed and the Z10 does not have any extraordinary feature to tempt users to migrate from other platforms to it.

That said, it is just the beginning and a solid one at that. The BlackBerry 10 UI is different, the onscreen keypad is exemplary and the new BBM promises to be the killer feature that it always used to be. If you currently own a BlackBerry Bold, Torch or Storm, I recommend you give the Z10 a shot, you would be pleasantly surprised.

The BlackBerry Z10 has been priced at an MRP of Rs 43,490, which is a deal breaker for non-BlackBerry users as there are better options available on Android and iOS at this price or lesser.

Photo Credit: Rohit Sharma

A quad-core processor, a 720p display and an 8-megapixel camera in a package worth Rs 13,990 is something people dream about in a world dominated by the Samsung Galaxy S III. Of course, at such a price the quality and user experience is not guaranteed, but that’s what Micromax is trying to prove with the Canvas HD. We put it through the paces, read on to find out if it’s worth the hype.

Design

Micromax is not known for its industrial design. It’s not known for its build quality. Actually that’s one of the reasons people choose brands like Nokia, and Samsung over local Indian brands because they are not sure about the quality of the product even though on paper they are more feature packed.

To just clear the air about the Canvas HD, we like to point out that it is the best Micromax smartphone build quality wise. We will be remiss to point this out because the build is on par with some of the higher end Samsung Galaxy smartphones. What we don’t like is duality of the color palette – Black on the front, White on the back. It looks ungainly, but the build of the phone especially at Rs 13,990 is superb. We will keep pointing out the price in this review because that’s the metric the phone should be judged by, it should not be compared to a phone that costs more than double.

Design wise it takes forward the heritage of the Canvas line of smartphones. To bystanders it also looks similar to the Samsung Galaxy S III, minus the signature home-button, as Micromax opts for a three capacitive key layout, which works perfectly.

The large 5-inch 720p display takes center stage and it converts to a pixel density of 294ppi. On top of the display we have the 2-megapixel camera and the usual suite of sensors. The back is highlighted with the large 8-megapixel camera which is supplemented by a LED flash on the bottom and there is also a speaker on the lower edge. The back plate can be removed quite easily. Once open, one can see the large 2,000mAh battery, the twin SIM card slots and a microSD card slot. On the left we get the twin volume rockers, the top is home to a 3.5mm jack and the microUSB port and the right is home to the power button.

The design of the Micromax Canvas HD does not elicit any emotion. It’s a very boring design, but it scores heavily in terms of its build quality and largely, the design is ergonomic and can be easily held as the curve on the back panel makes it very easy to hold.

Hardware

The Micromax Canvas HD scores heavily in terms of its hardware spec. It comes equipped with a large 5-inch 720p IPS display, a quad-core MediaTek SoC, which is clocked at 1.2GHz, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of internal memory (Only 1.77GB is available to the user), a microSD card slot, dual-SIM capabilities, a 8-megapixel camera and a 2,000 mAh battery.

When compared to 720p displays on phones like the Galaxy S III, and the HTC One X, then we have to say it is not the best, but for the price it is absolutely fantastic. In fact, apart from the Lava A1000 no other phone in this price range offers such a high-resolution display. The display is pretty washed out and blacks are not very deep, but it has decent viewing angles and is adequately bright when the brightness is bumped. While it may not be the best 720p display in the market, at this price point it is the best one save for the Lava A1000, which we have not tested yet.

Perhaps, the most surprising aspect of the Canvas HD is the 8-megapixel camera. It is surprisingly good and even when compared to the Samsung Galaxy Grand, the Micromax Canvas HD comes out in front. The low-light performance impressed us in particular, as it manages to retain more details and highlights and does not over expose images. Of course the images are grainy and it cannot be compared to an iPhone, but again the image quality is very good for the price. The device even does well while shooting video, but here the low-light performance does suffer a bit. We have a minor quibble with camera UI, which has been heavily customized by Micromax as the flash toggle switch is buried in a nonchalant corner.

Software

The Canvas HD comes loaded with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, which is relatively new. Micromax has lightly skinned the device, so one does not need to deal with intrusive Android skins like TouchWiz and HTC Sense. Now this is pretty subjective as these skins add a few software features, but these come at the cost of the general user experience. The Canvas HD maintains a clean Android ‘Holo’ UI, which is a delight to use save for a feature tweaked icons that look quite cartoonish and a few Micromax apps like the Hook Up messenger, the M!Store, M!Zone+ and M!Live.

Overall, the experience is pretty stock and slick. Another advantage of Android 4.1 is that users get access to apps like Google Now that add improved voice recognition and contextual information based on the users likes and dislikes.

We managed to run in to one glaring hitch with the Canvas HD when we installed the Flipboard app. The launcher started acting up and performance became very unstable. This problem was isolated to Flipboard only, but once installed the app was a pain to remove, but once removed the performance returned to normal.

Micromax did make one notable modification to the pull down menu as it added shortcuts for toggling between Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, 3G, Flight mode, and phone states. On the whole we liked the relatively toned down Android experience on the Canvas HD and we hope that more OEMs will follow suit.

Performance

The Canvas HD is powered by MediaTek’s MT6589 SoC, which has four ARM Cortex A7 cores that hum away at 1.2GHz. It works in concert with 1GB of RAM and a PowerVR 5XT GPU. But its performance cannot be compared with competing Nvidia Tegra 3 or Samsung Exynos chipsets that power the HTC One X and the Samsung Galaxy S III, because those chipsets have four ARM Cortex A9 cores. On the other hand, the ARM Cortex A7 SoC on the Canvas HD is more frugal with the way it sips power and that is evident in its battery life. So, it will be unfair to expect performance that will compete with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S III.

In a way we can say its performance is closer to dual-core ARM Cortex A9 chips found on phones like the Samsung Galaxy S II. That said, the Canvas HD just hums along without skipping a beat, though there is an in-tangible lag in its performance, especially if one has used other smartphones with quad-core processors. People living in a dual-core world will not notice it because the general performance of the device falls right between the dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPUs that were found on the flagship Android smartphones from 2011 and the quad-core ARM Cortex A9 chips in the flagship phones of 2012.

Even when we ran benchmarks our theory was ratified. For instance on the Quadrant benchmark it scored above 4,000. This is well above a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU and well below a quad-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU. Even the web browser performance is quite smooth. Admittedly, the pinch to zoom and scrolling is not as smooth as say the Galaxy Nexus or even the Galaxy S II, but for most purposes it is more than adequate.

The call quality on the Micromax Canvas HD is nothing to write home about. It is at best average. It failed calls in the basement where the iPhone managed to get a signal, but we are guessing that it’s not a deal breaker. The battery life on the Canvas HD is surprisingly good. For our tests we ran a video loop of a 720p copy of Batman Begins and it lasted for 4 hours and 43 minutes. While this may not be extremely impressive, the phone performs very well when it comes to day-to-day usage. It easily lasts a day and our daily usage involved browsing the web, email, social networking, a bit of photography, listening to music, and making a few calls and all this with 3G turned on.

Verdict

Does the Micromax Canvas HD successfully fulfill the promise of a solid reliable quad-core device with a HD screen at a price under Rs 15,000? For the part yes, save for a few odd software related glitches. Obviously, the screen and the performance just does not compete with some of the top-tier Android smartphones in the market, but then again it’s not supposed to at such a low price. It can get away because it represents incredible value at Rs 13,990. And when one accounts for the fact that it’s a dual-SIM device and has solid battery life then it becomes a no-brainer.

Additionally, it becomes a better option than Windows Phones in the price bracket, because in terms of usability it competes very well and it has the backing of a legion of Android apps on Google Play. Perhaps the only worry would be Micromax’s lackluster after sales service, and if that problem is resolved then, Micromax has a winner at its hands.

Photo Credit: Rohit Sharma

Paying Rs 25,000 seems a bit obscene for a headphone, but if you are an audio nut then an amount four times more will also be ‘okay’ if it is good enough for the ‘Sound of Music.’ Sennheiser, of course, is a well-known German audio brand and like most things German, nothing less than perfection will suffice. The Momentum headphones are their latest and greatest and they have been designed to deliver high quality ‘audiophile grade’ audio in a smart, luxurious package that has a mobile first attitude. Let’s see if the Momentum can get blood vessels rushing and add some needed momentum to the daily monotony of life.

Design

To get the ball rolling, the Sennheiser Momentum headphones come in a massive circular case that safely cuddle the headphones in a nice and plush cocoon. This is actually similar to the way the Monster Dr Dre Beats headphones are packaged, but we found the Momentum to have the better case between the two. That said, if one adds the Bowers & Wilkins P5s to the equation then the story changes a bit because the carry case for the P5s is made of a plush swede like material and its rather easy lug around. Due to the combination of the headphone design and the size of the case, the Momentum headphones are not that easy to carry around if one intends to use them all the time. It’s either that or one will need to leave the case back home and risk damaging the headphone.

The Momentums essentially have what we refer to a closed-back design. Sennheiser is very generous with the type of materials it has used in the headphones. The headphone marries plush leather for the ear cups, and a metallic exoskeleton that brandishes the Sennheiser branding quite grandly and an overhead metal band that too has been topped off lavishly with leather.

These headphones scream class; they are not loud and brash like the more youthful Beats by Dr Dre. Even the treatment on the cables is very very high-end. Right from the quality of the cable, in-line controls to the 3.5mm metal plug. In fact, the one thing we really appreciate is that even the in-line volume controls are completely metallic; in comparison the B&W P5s has a plastic control cluster that is prone to getting damaged.

Sennheiser provides two cables – one 52-inch long cable that also houses the volume controls and a 56-inch cable without the controls. Most manufactures do the same. The 3.5mm jack on the Momentum headphones is also is also vertically inclined at 90 degrees so that it fits comfortably and does not get entangled in any situation.

Comfort

Most premium headphones in this price bracket will provide the user with a level of comfort that one does not associate with much cheaper headphones. However, a hallmark of a great headphone in this category is that it manages to balance its design with a level of comfort and performance that is worthy of the money being spent.

The Sennheiser Momentums do very well in this regard. They owe this in due part to the plush leather on the ear cups and super light construction that enable the Momentums to weigh in at a nimble 190 grams. This weight is ideal for portable use, because even though they are closed back, they are easy to wear.

Even when compared to the Bose Quite Comfort 15 and the Beats by Dr Dre, the Sennheiser Momentum has the upper hand. They are decidedly better headphones in terms of comfort and portability and in the case of the Quite Comfort because of the active circuitry, there is something sterile about the whole experience that gives Sennheiser the edge in this regard.

Comparing it to the Bowers and Wilkins P5s is not entirely fair, because they are essentially on-ear headphones that recreate a spatial dynamic. But if general comfort is to be rated then, it really is a subjective opinion because that is purely on the basis one’s ear size. If you do have small ears then supple sheep leather found on the P5s will generally trounce the Momentums. That’s not to say that the Momentums are less luxurious, but the overall package in on P5s is a bit better for more or less the same price. The Momentums, on the other hand, will appeal to people with large earlobes, and the closed-back design is better equipped to cocoon the ears in more dense, yet comfortable sound field.

Performance

At the end of the day the real reason one spends so much money on a headphone is just for the sound. Most people will disregard the above to two segments of the review and jump right to the performance section because that’s what they are essentially paying for. The headphone could bleed them to death, but if it sounded perfect, it normally is worth the pain.

The good news is that the Sennheiser Momentums sound awesome. They sound better than any headphone made by JBL, Bose or Monster, in the given price bracket, but they just fall sort in front of the Bowers and Wilkins P5s, which also are admittedly very hard to get in India.

But for the part they just perform splendidly. They sound dynamic, blustery and if I dare say ballsey.

Ideally, they are perfect for the higher-mid range frequencies, but they can pack quite a thump with their bass response. Frankly, they can handle any genre of music with great conviction and will satisfy many an audiophile with the sheer purity of its sound.

For instance, if one cracks up the electronica with some DeadMau 5, then on songs like Strobe, the super-low bass frequencies are just not ethereal components of the sound, they are very much audible. But perhaps due to the closed back nature, it’s not as tight as the Bowers and Wilkins P5s.

If you really want a head rush, then lock-in Reflection by progressive metal maestros Tool and you don’t get a garbled sonic avalanche that flushes out the distorted guitar and bass. The vocals cut in beautifully, as do the drums. The sound using the Momentums is nuanced, especially the headphone exhibits incredible mid-range response found rarely in a non-amplified headphone.

The treble response is the Achilles heel of the Momentum. Not that it is bad, but if you love a lot of slow blues from the 60’s like Red House by Jimi Hendrix or Getting Back My Heart Together Again, the response is just as not smooth as what one would expect. The spring reverb sounds off, the guitars sound shriller than what they are and mind you we are talking about really sharp sounding distorted tunes, so they can give the listener a real bad headache.

Many audiophiles claim that classic music is the truest test of an audio product. Well who are we to argue, and so we went ahead and turned on Asturias by classical guitar legend John Williams. And we were treated to a perfectly balanced rendition of the same.

We also found that the Momentums double as very good headphones for gaming as well as for watching movies. This was particularly evident when we rattled it through Hitman Absolution and Drive.

The problem is they fall in no-mans land. They will not appeal to people who like an excess of bass as for that Beats by Dr Dre will mow it down. It does not have the active noise cancellation of the Bose Quite Comfort 15, nor is it portable and sonically balanced as the Bowers and Wilkins P5s.

Verdict

At Rs 24,990 the Sennheiser Momentum headphones are possibly the best closed-back headphones in the Indian market. Of course, they are not perfect, but the combination of the Sennheiser brand, sublime build quality and sound make them a very good option, if not the best option.

That said, if one does not want to be shackled by the design, then Bowers and Wilkins P5s do offer better sound (more balanced), a passive noise-cancellation system that’s the best in the business for approximately the same amount, and a more portable product, though it is not easy to find in India.

All tracks used for testing were encoded in FLAC and no MP3 files were tested.

Photo Credit: Rohit Sharma

The Nokia Lumia 820 is an unusual addition to the Finnish giant’s Windows Phone 8 portfolio. It neither flaunts a delectable uni-body design and PureView imaging prowess the Lumia 920 touts, nor it appeals to a more frugal consumer who does not want to spend a lot of money as it costs in excess of Rs 26,000. It is solely geared towards a person who wants to invest in a Windows Phone 8 experience, because for slightly more one could get the HTC One X, which many consider to be the best Android smartphone in the market. That said, there are a number of things going for the Lumia 820. Read on.

Design

We received a yellow Lumia 820 and like the yellow Lumia 920, it looks ugly at first brush and then grows on you, eventually leads you to believe that Nokia has nailed yellow and makes you wonder how you ever lived without a yellow colored phone. Yes, it may not be uni-body like the Lumia 920, but it has its own charm as the build is solid, but not superlative, but light years ahead of the thin scrawny plastic used in the Samsung Galaxy S III. It feels solid in hand, though a tad slippery. We even managed to drop the phone once, but the there was not even a single scratch.

An advantage of a non-uni-body design is that the battery can be removed. The Lumia 820 allows you to swap out your battery (1,650 mAh), but Nokia does not make the process easy. In fact, it perhaps is the most painful experience one may encounter while removing a back plate. There is not even a single groove that allows one to open the back plate; one basically has to manhandle the device to open the plate and risk breaking either the cover or a fingernail. The thing is that one will have to pry the back cover open to insert a SIM card and a microSD card, so there’s no escaping the process at least once. Users can also use interchangeable back panels that can even add wireless charging capabilities. These panels are sold separately and are not part of the package.

From a basic aesthetic standpoint the Lumia 820 may come off as a bland looking uninspired device. It has straight lines and it looks rather rectangular from all corners and unlike the 920 it does not have a dramatic curvature on its back. Fortunately, though it has a more subtle contour on its sides that makes holding the phone in one hand very comfortable.

The front is dominated by a 4.3-inch AMOLED display that is flanked by the standard Windows Phone 8 keys on the bottom and a suite of sensors and a VGA front camera on the top. The 8-megapixel rear camera punctuates the device on the top in the center. It is accompanied by a LED flash and a discrete Carl Zeiss branding.

The left side is bereft of any controls or ports, the top right hand corner is home to the 3.5mm port, the right hand side has two volume rockers, the power button and the camera shutter key and the bottom houses the micro-USB port and the loudspeaker. Interestingly, the control keys are made up of a nice enamel like material that is not only very easy to press and not hard or stiff like plastic or steel and blends beautifully with the design of the phone.

Hardware

The Lumia 820 is a very powerful smartphone. In fact, for Windows Phone 8 the amount of firepower it has is a bit overkill. It uses the same Qualcomm Snapdragon Plus processor clocked at 1.5GHz with dual-cores that we have seen before in the Lumia 920. Additionally, there is 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage, NFC and a 8-megapixel rear camera. It also has a 4.3-inch AMOLED display that has Nokia’s ClearBlack filter on top and can even be used with gloves. The resolution of the panel is a bit underwhelming on paper at 800×480 pixels and is a very 2011, when compared to more modern smartphones in this price band.

However, in our testing, this is perhaps the best AMOLED panel we have ever come across. It’s vivid, has the truest blacks if there is something like that and stunning viewing angles. It falls short in terms of pure crispness thanks to the low resolution, but that too is an issue not many will face because of the ‘Tile’ based Metro UI on Windows Phone 8. The typography on the platform is bold and large so, one does not have many reading issues. These issues only prop up while using the web-browser as then the text might look a bit crummy when compared to other higher resolution displays.

If one talks about the camera, then the first thing one wants to know how much better is than the camera on the Lumia 920. Well, the answer is that the Lumia 920 has a wildly better camera in particularly when it comes to low-light performance. The Lumia 820 is no match in this regard. But one should remember that not many devices are. The iPhone 5 included. If one removes the Lumia 920 from the equation then the 820 compares very favorably with the Samsung Galaxy S III. In low-light the performance is a bit disappointing, but frankly it’s not bad. The camera software is not very customizable, but one needs to go through the plethora modes the device offers out of the box to get the best out of it. There are a number of Lens apps that tie into the camera suite, but we have more on them in the software section below.

Software

Well, it’s a Windows Phone. So there is not a lot that’s different from other Windows Phone devices, apart from the Nokia apps that are bundled with the device. The hallmark of the OS is fast and fluid performance coupled with incredibly synergy with Microsoft services.

Microsoft has revamped the home-screen to incorporate resizable tiles and this makes for a huge user-interface improvement. More content can be filled up on the home-screen that dynamically updates itself and this basically allows for an environment where there is no need for a notification center. Of course naysayers will always argue the need for one and even Microsoft has contemplated building one, but the one thing that really bugs is that the battery level counter remains hidden until one taps on the top bar.

The Nokia apps are what make a Nokia Windows Phone device unique. Nokia Drive+Beta is arguably the best turn-by-turn navigation app across platforms, but that’s now coming to other Windows Phone 8 devices, so that’s not an advantage for the 820, but apart from that there is plenty of stuff.

There is Cinematograph. It’s a very nifty little app that allows users to shoot little animated .gif files. It’s a very cool little feature that adds another dimension to the out of the box imaging experience. Users can share them on Nokia Memories and embed them too, but unfortunately the resolution is on the lower side.

The Panorama lens is a delight to use, and in our opinion it is more intuitive than the built-in solution in iOS 6 for the iPhone. The Smart Shot feature takes multiple shots of a subject and then allows the user to pick the best shot. This is basically the same as Best Shot found on Samsung smartphones.

Finally there is the Creative Studio app. In a nutshell, it interlocks the simplicity of a filter based app like Instagram, with the customizable editing capabilities of an app like Snapseed. That said, by default it only has nine filters, but the user can further edit the images on basis of a number of parameters.

But Nokia has two apps that we consider to be the game changers – Nokia Music and Mix Radio. Mix Radio is a music streaming service and it has access to a large repository of local and international music. More importantly the MixRadio bit is free for all Lumia users and that’s an advantage no other OEM can boast. It offers free radio mixes and users can skip up to six songs per hour and is ad free. Users can also download the songs for free. Frankly, this is actually a reason to buy a Lumia smartphone.

Talking about the music, even the stock Music player app has Dolby Surround sound built-in. And the reason we bring this up is because it adds more presence and the audio is more dynamic and the bass is a tad tighter and this allows for an improved aural experience, which is wildly better than say a HTC handset that comes with Beats Audio that acts like a glorified ‘Bass Boost’ pre-set. Additionally, users can also manually adjust the EQ to their hearts content, which is always good.

Apart from this the main Achilles heel of the platform remains the lack of apps, the lack of Google apps in particular. If you are happy planting your online life, in Microsoft’s ecosystem then this is fine, but if not then the lack of Google software on Windows Phone 8 can be a real hassle.

Performance

As mentioned above the performance is fast and fluid. It’s more akin to what iPhone users expect of their devices. Everything just blazes and that’s to be expected when a device packs in a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus chip with 1GB of RAM. If one had to compare it a similarly specced Windows Phone like the Lumia 920, then it will be hard to compare the performance because, honestly, the specs are identical, only for the fact that Lumia 920 has a higher resolution display and a superior camera.

We tested this by running synthetic benchmarks like WP Bench and Multi-Bench and the performance was pretty similar between both the devices. As far as the browser speeds were concerned, we found that the stock Safari browser on the iPhone 5 was a tad quicker than Internet Explorer 10 on the Lumia 820, but generally the performance was quite fast. The Browsermark benchmark  disagreed with us and but in daily use it mostly steamrolled the competition. Everything was butter smooth including pinch-to-zoom something that’s not true on Android in particular.

In our testing the device lasted 20 hours easily on a single charge which involved regular texts, emails, web browsing, social networking, calling, photography, music – basically the regular stuff one would do with a smartphone of this caliber. This was on par for the course, though one has to admit coming from Android this would sound like brilliant battery life. But in all honesty we have seen devices like the iPhone 5 that have a smaller batteries but manage to perform even better, so battery life is a combination of battery size and optimization with software and hardware. Mind you, having too many live tiles that connect to the Internet to update will drastically bring the battery life down.

The call quality on the Lumia 820 was surprisingly good. It did all the basics right, and the general quality of calls was solid. One area where it did surprise us was while we used it in a nightclub where signal performance was very poor. Our Lumia 820 managed to get a call through while the iPhone 5 failed, even when both were running on an Airtel connection.

Verdict

The Nokia 820 is rock solid phone. It’s in fact a very good phone, which unfortunately is a tad over priced in our opinion. For another extra Rs 3,000-Rs 4,000, one can easily get the HTC One X and similar products. If one takes that out of the equation, then it is a well-built smartphone that has a good camera, superb browser, and some brilliant Nokia exclusive software and it generally performs like a rocket. That said, Windows Phone 8 is just not the platform to buy into for app junkies.

Photo Credit: Rohit Sharma